I have a BBQ (Braai in my language) in prep …
Chicken breast (skin off & one per person), marinated in a peri-peri sauce.
Red chillies, your choice depending on chilli tolerance, 1 per breast is OK more for hotter, I go for bird’s-eye chilli but they are hot, seeded & chopped
Garlic, I use one per breast, peeled & halved
Smoked paprika, I prefer sweet but 1 tsp for 2 breasts
Oregano, 1 tsp for 2 breasts
A glug of lemon juice, 1 lemon for 2
White wine vinegar 1 tsp
Sugar I prefer (prefer demerara)
Sea salt to taste
Blitz, but don’t over do it, just so you can still see some small bits
Marinade for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.
If you prefer chicken in kebab style, marinade for up to 4 hours
Cook over medium hot heat, I prefer juicy rather than over cook (dry).
We will have whole sweet corn also cooked on the braai
Wrap in foil with butter, a generuous grind of salt & pepper
I cook on a Weber kettle (covered) braai & the corn gets cooked for 1 hour turned regularly but as far as possible away from direct fire.
Broad bean & whole meal turmeric rice (cooked in the kitchen)
Thanks for the recommendation - just ordered a copy. 2 days later … it’s arrived. Very impressed, it has good sections on spices, hints and tips and an excellent selection of recipes that includes dals and side dishes.
I have two other great guides to curry - the Indian cookery course by Monisha Bharadwaj and the BBC’s Pebble Mill Indian Cookery by Lolita Ahmed. Different in scope but both a delight.
This is my favourite Indian cookbook. The recipes are all really simple and there is nothing like the brown sludge you get at most restaurants. Curry only means food cooked in a sauce and the vast majority of Indian food isn’t actually curry.
My dentist is Indian born and I was telling her what I’d cooked the day before, from this book. She asked how I’d done it and then said that was exactly how she’d do it, which is testament to it being proper food rather than anglicised rubbish. It’s a good book even if you are not a veggie. For non veggie stuff I find good old Madhur Jaffrey hard to beat.
Got lucky with the fishman that comes Wednesday mornings locally with two dressed crabs.
Thinking a simple babyleaf salad with something crunchy, maybe raw fresh peas, mangetout or broadbeans.
The original BBC Madhur Jaffrey book is still my most used cookery book, with a really good selection of recipes from around India. Along with Delia Smith, Ken Hom etc. it also takes me back to a time when the BBC made cookery progrmmes that were actually about food, not vacuous personalities.
My wife is veggie, and will will happily eat food from those recipes. Last night we had cauliflower with fennel and mustard seeds, red lentils with cumin and rice with peas. All old favourites from the book, although I admit to adding some leftover grilled chicken to mine.
Sorry HH are you referring to the Madhur Jaffrey book or did you forget to include a link, couldn’t work out who you were replying to (probably my error).
In a not strictly prickly manner, I can defend minhs use of a universal sauce for a curry base.
In as much as that of a spiced onion sauce.
Most recipes I have followed have those usual lines of spice cooking along with an extensive use of slow braising of lots of onions.
Most curry sauces use onions as a base. If you can spend time getting a batch of spiced onion sauce ready, this can spead up the process.
…much like making boulagnaise beef sauce before making lasagne.
Undoubtedly you could use precooked onions when starting, to save time, but pre-spicing would only work properly for those dishes using at least that quantity of the same spices, whereas many recipes have significant differences in the spice combinations. And you still have to cook the spices you need (some take-aways and restaurants don’t even properly cook the spices, adversely affecting the flavour!).
However, whilst for domestic purposes it seems pointless, I do recognise that for commercial cooking it well may be that a number of different bases could be prepared in advance without any detriment, encompassing a range of dishes, and more easily than individually preparing and marinating a range of bulk dishes. Indeed not to do that would likely severely limit the range they could offer on demand unless they can manage with high levels of waste. Unfortunately in so many restaurants and take-aways that I’ve tried there has been very little variation in flavour between different dishes, and very little depth of flavour to discern beneath the heat, whereas I know that when I follow what I understand are authentic recipes everything tastes different and the depths of flavour can be exquisite. I do not know for a fact that a single base curry sauce is used for many dishes, but I have heard that on several occasions from different sources, and it seems to fit my taste experience.
I’m not sure what needs elaborating? All too often from both restaurants and take aways out of a selection of main dishes (typically with friends we might have 6 or more, all for sharing) and although with varying degrees of chilli spice, the taste of most seems to be the same, one will have more tomatoes in, another more onions, another a coconut flavour, but the base spice taste is the same, little or no identifiable tastes of individual spices, even the more dominant ones like cumin or cloves or cardamon.
I did find one take away in Newcastle upon Tyne some years ago that was different, every dish deliciously fragrant with an explosion of different blend of spice notes from each dish, and over the years I’ve experienced a couple of restaurants likewise. Maybe I’m just unlucky.
First post on this thread. Roast belly pork with apple and cider sauce, celeriac, bacon, chestnut and Savoy cabbage in cream and roast parsnips.
Parsnip season is over so they weren’t great but the crisp pork skin and succulent meat were scrumptious
Washed down with The Paddler NZ Riesling 2012. Only 9% and quite sweet. Acidity a bit lacking but was still very enjoyable.
